Punch cards were not that hard to sort after dropping them.
Once you have a deck, draw some thing on the deck edges with a permanent marker making sure that all the card edges have been marked.
If the deck is dropped, first of all it doesn't usually scatter that much (cards tend to stick to neighbor) and the marks on the edge help visually sort the deck pretty fast.
Actually punch cards could have indexes. Several programming languages did not not use the last columns of the cards and reserved them for a number which could be used by card sorting machines.
Punch cards were generally created by hand so the ability to cut and paste new punch cards was considered a significant advantage. This on the other hand is created by a computer and not human readable so a simple index is easy enough to add.
The striping actually is redundancy -- it's a redundant ordering indicator for the deck. The nominal ordering is ... the card order. But should that be disturbed, the stripe (a diagonal marking across the edge of the cards) will indicate which cards are out of sequence.
I first encountered this trick in a college library with a physical card catalog. Having been pranked once too often by students re-arranging the drawers, the fronts of the catalogs were crossed with multiple bands of different colored tape. Any out of sequence drawers could be immediately noticed and quickly sorted visually.
